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Rand Paul, Anti-Incumbent Republican

Today in Kentucky, Republican primary voters are poised to hand
a major defeat to the GOP establishment and the neoconservatives
(if the two can be distinguished). Rand Paul, a Bowling Green
ophthalmologist and the son of Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has a
healthy lead over Old Guard favorite Trey Grayson in the nomination
contest for the 2011 Senate race.

Should Paul win that seat, it could open the door to fresh
thinking in the GOP on foreign policy and the war on drugs.

The Tea Partiers who back Paul the Younger often carry signs
like “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Given father Ron’s libertarian
convictions, people often assume that Rand Paul is named after the
self-styled “radical for capitalism” who wrote Atlas
Shrugged.

Actually, “Rand” is short for “Randall” — though “Trey
Grayson” sounds like a moniker Miss Rand might have given to one of
her lesser villains, a “timeserver,” rather than a menacing
arch-“looter.”

Establishment hawks see the race as an epic battle, however.
Grayson’s garnered endorsements from the likes of Rudy Giuliani and
Dick Cheney, who fear that a Paul victory would be read as a
repudiation of neoconservative foreign policy.

Rand has distanced himself from his father’s foreign-policy
noninterventionism, insisting he’s for the war in Afghanistan and
against rapid withdrawal from Iraq. That hasn’t stopped Trey the
Gray’s backers from trying to make the campaign a referendum on
Rand Paul’s allegedly “strange ideas.” They may be sorry they
did.

“Paul would’ve Voted Against the War in Iraq,” crows a Grayson
campaign Web site, randpaulstrangeideas.com. Yes, that must seem
strange indeed to the American public, over 60 percent of which
routinely tells pollsters that they’re against the war.

Stranger still to establishment Republicans apparently, is the
fact that “Paul Criticized the Gonzalez [sic] v. Raich
Decision” on medical marijuana.

If the Grayson team knew the first thing about that 2005 Supreme
Court case, they’d know it’s a major obstacle to battling
Obamacare. Raich upheld the feds’ power to prosecute medical
marijuana patients on the theory that even those who grew and
consumed their own crop were engaged in interstate commerce.

As Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent pointed out, that means
Congress “can regulate virtually anything,” even “quilting bees and
potluck suppers.” Obamacare’s defenders are delighted they’ll have
that precedent available when the individual mandate reaches the
court.

Rand, a more cautious politician than his dad, has dodged these
attacks deftly. Father Ron’s success owes largely to what you might
call a “cult of no personality.” I mean that in a good way —
the Texas congressman, who’s given to earnest lectures on the
Constitution, lacks the artful charm of the professional pol. In an
age of prepackaged sound bites, many find Rep. Paul’s guilelessness
electrifying.

Paul 2.0 is more circumspect: Rather than openly advocate drug
decriminalization, Rand favors “a more local approach to drugs …
it’s a state issue.” He sells foreign-policy restraint
pragmatically, “oppos[ing] reckless ‘nation building’ or burdening
our troops by making them the world’s police force.”

Those positions aren’t nearly as unpopular as party dinosaurs
would like. Support for marijuana legalization is growing, and, in
a 2007 poll, 76 percent of Americans agreed “the U.S. is playing
the role of world policeman more than it should be.”

In a March forum at the Cato Institute, Rep. Tom McClintock,
R-Calif., suggested that a silent majority, “more than half of the
Republican caucus,” has serious doubts about the approach to
foreign policy that dominated the Bush years. If a
noninterventionist — even one half in the closet, like Rand
Paul — wins over Republican voters, that could embolden other
freethinkers — a healthy thing for the party and the
country.